James Bond 007 for the Atari 2600

When eBay was launched, I was an early buyer and went hog-wild buying Atari 2600 games and hardware. It was total wish-fulfillment. I wanted every game that I didn’t get in eighties and it was amazing. People were selling games by the boxes full of random games. When they arrived, I would carefully pick through them, looking for high quality games that I did not have.

Sometimes I would find a game that I remembered and would often drop what I was doing and run off to play it. One of those games was James Bond 007. A game I remembered, but had never played and when I turned it on I was confused. This wasn’t the game I remembered at all. The problem was, how could I remember a game that I never played? How is this possible?

As it turns out, the answer was pretty simple. I had never played the game. Instead, I had seen a very memorable ad with gameplay that did not resemble the gameplay in the game I now owned. That wouldn’t be a huge deal if it wasn’t for the fact that his game, just wasn’t that good. Instead of whatever the train climbing game we see in the ad above, we got a game full of cobbled together screens that lack coherence. Sure its challenging and has some decent music, but it really doesn’t feel much like a “Bond” game.